Looking back at Jupiter, Year Three con't

Brian Libby scoured the fair last year and wrote this report. For those who've gone each year, how did this year's fair turn out and how does it contextualize what's happened so far? Find out tomorrow....

"Nice to see you made it from Fifth Avenue," said one patron to another during Friday evening's $100-a-ticket benefit gala to open The Affair @ The Jupiter Hotel, Portland's burgeoning art fair.

A couple of bigwig New York collectors, perhaps? Well, not in this case. "Maybe I'll see you back at the hotel," the man continued. He'd been referring to downtown Portland's Fifth Avenue Suites, not the posh Manhattan address.

But as it happens, this year's Affair did feature a nationwide array of galleries from San Francisco, New York, Boston, Miami, Chicago and elsewhere. Biggest of all contingents were the five galleries from Atlanta, where the fair's co-organizer, Stuart Horodner, is director of programs for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.

"It gets easier every year," Horodner said during Friday's opening gala as he looked out from the second-floor veranda of this mid-century modern motel on East Burnside. "I think we've been able to grow the fair into a really good cross section of what's happening in the art world."

Now in its third year, the fair's success has benefited from its timing: Art fairs are increasingly popular around the world, both as tourist destinations (a group of more than 80 came here this weekend as part of an art-fair tour package) and as important factors in gallery sales. "I've talked to dealers here this weekend who get as much as 50 percent of their revenue from art fairs," says Bob Kochs of Portland's Augen Gallery, which displayed works by modernist master Josef Albers and former Wieden+Kennedy advertising whiz Jim Griswold at the fair.

For the Atlanta galleries, "it was a chance to present ourselves as a regional block," said Errol Crane of that city's Marcia Wood Gallery. Southern art may not be the first thing people think of about the Affair, but artists like Marcus Kenney, one of Marcia Wood's artists, were distinctive. Kenney makes intricate, vibrantly colorful mixed-media works on canvas entirely out of found materials, from cutouts of old paint-by-numbers paintings to Dante-esque flames made from decals bought at the artist's local Auto Zone in Atlanta. "It's like a collaboration," he says. "I work intuitively, but it's all about celebrating all these materials."

The fair has been characterized in the past by many smaller, more affordable works, often pinned to the walls without frames. It reflects the youth of Portland's art scene, but also its casual lack of pretension. Yet there were also works here by legendary artists such as Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg and William Eggleston --and they were all framed. And besides, says the fair's co-organizer, Laurel Gitlen, "A collector can still spot something good if it's sitting on the floor."

The Eggleston print actually was shown by a Portland gallery that hasn't even opened its doors yet: Quality Pictures, a first-time venture into art dealing by a longtime Atlanta collector, Erik Schneider.

"Life's too short," he says. "I've been a CPA for 20 years. I just thought I had to try this." But why Portland? "There's a very enthusiastic art community here that's well organized," he says. "It feels like a place to be." Schneider will open his gallery later this year with a strong collection emphasizing photography, including Oregon Biennial featured artist Mark Hooper.

This year's Affair also reflected the growing presence of video works. In its room at the fair, for example, Elizabeth Leach Gallery featured an installation by longtime local experimental filmmaker Matt McCormick called "Ride a Wave to Tomorrow's Sunset": The entire bathroom of the motel room was covered in aluminum foil, and two wall-mounted video screens played ambient scenes of lapping waves and an orange evening sky.

More traditional painting and drawing were also represented, but often revitalized with fresh ideas and good old-fashioned craft. San Francisco's Heather Marx Gallery featured one of the fair's most stunning works, Stephen Giannetti's "Colorfield Fifty-One," a succession of layered circles hand-painted in oil onto French polyester, imbuing a seemingly mass-produced pattern with detail and warmth. Another San Francisco dealer, Gregory Lind Gallery, featured Los Angeles artist Asuka Ohsawa's dazzling re-interpretations of traditional Japanese giga drawings in a series of colorful, whimsical prints depicting scenes of animals and people that contained subtle social criticism.

Besides the art itself, the Affair had a celebratory feel, aided perhaps by an opening-night performance by former Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, but stemming primarily from the stream of patrons weaving in and out of these motel rooms-turned-showrooms amid the ice machines, beds and televisions.

The coveted collectors were here, yes, but also bearded hipsters in jeans and families with kids still wearing their soccer cleats after a morning's game. The Affair may carry the buzz of art-world trends and discoveries, but it also remains decidedly Portland.